by Thaisa Frank
Lodenstein acted as though the letter wasn’t worthy of attention. What do you make of this? he said.
There’s nothing to make of it, said the officer. Just get everybody up here with their papers.
But they’re imagining Goebbels.
The officer looked confused, and Lodenstein said:
Hasn’t anyone ever told you about this important ritual?
The officer shook his head, and Lodenstein, whose heart was thumping, explained that every day the Scribes spent half an hour invoking an image of Joseph Goebbels—the mind behind this vital project.
If they didn’t remember him, he said, nothing would get done. Interruption could mean catastrophe.
The officer agreed to spend time in Lodenstein’s room—he referred to them as quarters—until the Scribes had finished their imagining. He even went back to his Kübelwagen and brought back a bottle of brandy. Then he walked down the incline slowly, examining the walls and taking note of everything in the room. He was a non-communicative man who stared with the pinched reticence of someone who has learned to observe carefully. He asked about the trunk on the floor in the corner of the room: Lodenstein said he was keeping mementos to exhibit after Germany won the war. The officer looked pleased and asked about a camisole on the dresser: Lodenstein said one woman or another was always in his room. The officer asked about the clerestory windows. Lodenstein told him the architect, Hans Ewigkeit, who disguised the mine as the shepherd’s hut, had created one room above the earth. The officer asked about the playing cards. Lodenstein explained he liked to play solitaire. He picked up the camisole again and said he liked the smell of the tea-rose perfume. Lodenstein agreed and gave him more brandy. Soon the officer was pleasantly drunk. He leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes. The order slipped from his hands. Lodenstein wished it would float away like the letter on the train. But it stayed—heavy and inert. Lodenstein doubted it would float in water.
The order was scribbled on the letterhead of the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the signature was unclear. Below was an old German saying appropriated by the Reich: Übersetzer sind Verräter.
Translators are traitors.
Lodenstein put the orders on the bed and watched the light from the windows. It was hazy, the light of late afternoon, and fell in shafts on the quilt, the pillows, the officer’s face, and a deck of playing cards on the bedside table. Because he’d stopped playing cards, the suits now looked like images from the real world instead of symbols to be sorted, stacked, and swept. Hearts were something lovers would carve. Diamonds were stones. The court cards were mirror images, and Lodenstein remembered someone telling him this was a superstition: if an image appeared as a mirror image, then royalty was safe and couldn’t be beheaded. He set the cards down, walked to the windows, and wondered if the roll call was a ruse. But when he read the orders again he saw Asher’s name. And Daniel’s. There was also a note that said: nameless child.
The memo on the side table seemed to speak out loud: translators are traitors.
Suddenly, without forethought, he grabbed the pillow on Elie’s side of the bed and held it over the officer’s face. He pressed the pillow against the officer’s ears and held it around his mouth—not looking at the pillow, only at his hands, which bent the pillow with the force of someone bending steel. His hands didn’t look like hands, but blocklike objects with a will of their own, separate from his heart and mind. They pressed and pressed until the officer began to gasp and flail. His kicking made the night table inch toward the bed until playing cards crashed to the floor. It occurred to Lodenstein that these cards once belonged to someone who had been deported, probably dead now, and while his hands pressed the pillow he had a vision of all the dead conferring with the officer and making such a fuss no letter in the world could stop them from gathering, gossiping, complaining, accusing him.
These thoughts only made him press harder, until the officer’s body went limp. He left the pillow over his face and tried not to think, I killed someone, or to feel the torn, ragged feeling in his heart. He looked at his hands and thought—as if he were talking to hands that belonged to someone else—you killed someone. They were in knots. He had a hard time unclenching them.
The pillow had burst and was leaking eiderdown. The quilt was covered with mud from the officer’s thrashing boots. Lodenstein looked at the pillow long enough to imagine a scarecrow-like impression of the officer’s face. Then he looked away and began to think about burying the body: He couldn’t bring it to the woods because the ground was still too hard from winter. He couldn’t leave it unburied because it might be discovered. The only solution was a room only he knew about. This room was in the tunnel that led to town and wasn’t on any existing map of the Compound.
THE TUNNEL
Lodenstein took a spade and three keys from the bottom of the trunk. One key belonged to the door to his room, which he locked. Another belonged to the door to the tunnel that led to the town three miles away. The third opened the room only he knew about. It was on the left side of the tunnel that dead-ended at the Compound and had been placed there mysteriously. No one explained why when he’d been given the keys.
Lodenstein walked past the Solomons’ to the same arched door Gitka had made Maria trace with her hands—the trompe l’oeil that looked just like the earth. He looked to see no one was watching then struggled with the key. Perhaps the door had never been opened. Or maybe the key didn’t fit. But the door gave way, pushing Lodenstein into darkness and cold air and the smell of foul waste rushing from the downhill stream. He edged slowly, holding his gun in one hand, feeling the wall with the other. He unlocked the room in the dark.
It consisted of three walls that abutted the mine and a dirt wall to accommodate the door. Except for the fourth wall, the three other walls and the floor were jagged earth and rocks, so the whole enclosure was a terrain of coal hills and dirt valleys.
The odor vanished as soon as he closed the door. Lodenstein was in absolute quiet, surrounded by the smell of clean earth. This made the room seem like a sanctuary—small and safe, carved of earth. Lodenstein sat against the wall, lit a cigarette, and tried to forget he was about to bury someone he’d just murdered. It could have been long ago when he and his friends played hide and seek, finding the most obscure places to wait and be found. It could have been an ordinary day in childhood.
He finished the cigarette and dug with the spade. The earth was hard, digging was laborious, and he had to rest. He lit another cigarette and watched idly while he shone his flashlight. The beam traveled across the floor, making a clear white line. It traveled up the wall. The rocks looked like large pieces of obsidian—a wall of black jewels. It was strangely lovely and made him forget about the officer until the flashlight illuminated another object. These jewels were white, angular. They shone with bleached radiance inside the beam.
He came closer with his flashlight and let his eyes adjust to the deep encompassing darkness. The white jewels seemed sharp and defined, from another world and yet familiar. He traced the outlines with reticence. It was starting to dawn on him that the white jewels weren’t jewels at all, but something far more human. He saw the outline of pubic bones. Their curves made a place to sit and were attached to four femurs—a perfect box—which appeared to be attached to four skeletal feet. There was also a vertical back to this object—a rib cage. Every single bone was a human bone. And Lodenstein realized he was seeing a chair. There was an identical chair next to it. There was also a side table.
For a moment he had the outrageous thought that these once belonged to a whole living room, and if reunited with this room, would turn into ordinary furniture again. He imagined transporting everything to the right place where it would transform to a time before a war, when no one thought about answering the dead or traveling on moonless nights to a place where people were kept and herded like cattle. He imagined that these bones were only an apparition of stones and darkness. But there was nowhere to take them. N
owhere at all. And they weren’t an apparition, but furniture. Furniture that had once been alive.
He gagged, clawed at the walls, got dirt under his fingernails, and managed to close the door. He rushed to the cobblestone street and locked the trompe l’oeil.
He gagged again.
Xavier,
Where are you? Where are you? I seek you everywhere.
I seek you everywhere. If I can’t find you, find me.
Marianne
In the main room of the Compound, no one had an inkling that an officer had arrived. Elie was at her desk, Stumpf was in the watchtower, and the Scribes were trying on new glasses, waiting to be fitted for them, or basking in the pleasure of just having received them. Gitka had glasses on the end of her nose and was holding her long cigarette holder. Niles Schopenhauer wore rimless glasses and a raccoon coat. Lodenstein watched it all at a distance. His hands were shaking. His breath came in bursts. He held his elbows and tried to breathe more slowly while he watched Scribes admire their glasses as if nothing had changed. They had no idea death was so close—in the forest, the room with the clerestory windows, the space with the black jewels. They had no idea he’d just killed an officer and found a mausoleum at the end of the hall. Nothing will ever be the same, he thought. This Compound is a coffin.
People were too preoccupied to notice when he began to rifle through a bag against the wall. He tossed out boots, hats, and scarves until he found a pair of leather gloves. But when a shovel clattered against the telescope, people turned toward him.
Nafissian said he ought to get glasses too. They would give you a kind of dignity, he said.
Without question, said Niles Schopenhauer.
But La Toya stood up and said: We all know the glasses are just a distraction. This is still the place where we write to the dead.
Or the almost-dead, said Nafissian.
Or about-to-be-dead, said Gitka.
And we can only hope that someone reads these letters, said La Toya. If we call this room anything, we should call it the Optimistic Mailroom.
No, no, said Nafissian. It will always be the Dreamatorium.
People got absorbed in the joke, and no one noticed when Lodenstein went to the broom closet—always a tangle of packing tape, candles, torn sou’westers, cardboard boxes, and now crowded with more fur coats. Lodenstein rooted around until he found a screwdriver and a hammer. No one knows they’ve come close to getting their asses hauled up for roll call, he thought. They think this place is a carnival. He kicked the broom closet shut.
The officer was lying calmly, without rancor, and looked like someone napping, with a pillow to shield his eyes from sun. Lodenstein had to fold him in half—difficult because the officer was still limp. He stuffed him into the duffel bag, shoving him so hard he heard something crack—perhaps a bone. He slung the duffel bag over his shoulders, locked his door, and took the mineshaft. He was prepared to say he was bringing extra letters to the hall—an unbelievable claim, since everyone knew he had nothing to do with the letters. But when he passed the Solomons’ and Lars saw him with the duffel bag, his incredulous expression told him he didn’t need an excuse.
Do you need any help? said Lars stepping forward.
Just keep the street clear, said Lodenstein.
Lars nodded and walked toward La Toya, who had already seen him.
He thought he heard La Toya saying it’s about time and couldn’t wait to get back to the trompe l’oeil. But when he reached it, he stood by the lock, beset by accelerating fear. Years ago, at the beginning of the war, the Gestapo often shot people in this tunnel. Sometimes the arms fire was so furious, so frequent, it sounded like typewriters. When Stumpf was in charge, the Scribes wrote as many letters as they could because they were afraid of being dragged to this very same tunnel and shot. Suppose the SS were waiting for him in ambush? Suppose the officer was someone the Reich wanted to get rid of, and they knew he’d use the room to bury him? He forced himself to open the door and once more was overpowered by the foul odor of waste. He dragged the duffel bag through the moist, endless dark.
The chairs and table had been fastened with bolts and brackets. Lodenstein unscrewed them, furious at the time it took, but grateful that nothing clattered too loudly because even though the passage was soundproof, he was afraid the Solomons could hear. When the bolts were unscrewed, he pried them apart with the hammer. But the seat of the chair—the pelvis—had been glued, and he had to smash it again and again until it shattered. One bracket stuck to a foot, and he pulverized the foot until it turned to gravel. When the bones were in pieces, he covered the duffel bag with dirt, spread the dirt with bones, and smashed the heap with his shovel.
Before guards had been sent to the front, they had lived in Mueller’s room. Lodenstein remembered it as a place of cards, drinking, and high-spirited arguments. Now it was crowded with rosewood furniture and still held a trace of Mueller’s malevolent secrecy. Lodenstein hated the room, but he was covered with dirt and bone and had to wash by sneaking to the kitchen, filling a soup pot with water, and dragging it to the room. He ripped sheets and scrubbed his face and hands and hair. The water grew thick and muddy. He sneaked to the kitchen again, refilled the pot, and dragged it back to the room. Mueller had left a green trench coat and long underwear in his closet. Lodenstein put them on and ripped the SS insignia from the trench coat. He swallowed some schnapps and listened to the Scribes getting ready for the night.
Shoes clattered and fabric rustled as people changed from one pair of street clothes to another. An argument erupted about the lottery. Then there was a barrage of typing—the last diary entry for the day or a new phrase in Dreamatoria.
He heard La Toya propose a game, and someone else say:
Not tonight. And no typing in that damned journal.
There’s plenty to write about, said La Toya.
People were laughing about a word in Dreamatoria. Then there was a lottery for cigarettes. Then more laughing about another word. Lodenstein was incensed that people could laugh. He was incensed that the ordinary world could go on.
He stormed into the hall, thinking he’d get angry at the Scribes then decided he wanted to keep everything to himself—the Scribes already lived with unbearable fear. He stood outside Mueller’s room, heard voices at the end of the hall, and, through flickering gaslights, saw Elie and Asher at the far end of the street. They couldn’t see him, so he had the detached, nearly disembodied sense that he was watching a play. They were on a wrought-iron bench, sharing a cigarette, and looked gracious, slightly mannered. When they’d finished the cigarette, Asher went to his room, and Elie came down the hall. Lodenstein turned away. He felt relieved to be distracted by a twinge of jealousy. Elie touched his arm.
For God’s sake, what happened to you? she said.
I’ll tell you later. But we’ll sleep in Mueller’s old room. What were you two talking about anyway?
Whether we’re safe, said Elie. She looked at the trench coat. Your hands are freezing. And what are you doing with Mueller’s long underwear?
I said I’ll tell you later.
She led him back into the room, closed the door, began to unlace his boots, and startled when she saw they were caked with earth and splinters of bone.
Gerhardt, she said. Tell me what happened.
But he couldn’t say a word. His throat felt clogged with dirt.
Gerhardt, tell me.
He turned and held her shoulders.
Are you sure you want to know? he said. Are you sure you’d want to know if something I did helped turn you into a murderer? Tell me—would you really want to know?
Elie began to cry, and he let go his grip and held her. Her collarbone moved effortlessly, like wings. But the curve of her bones beneath took him back to the dark, moist room and the chair in a beam of bone-white light. He felt something else too—an ineffable place inside her that held all the unseen mechanisms that let her dream and walk and breathe and be Elie. Then he was crying too.
Gerhardt, please, said Elie. Whatever you did is in a good cause.
I don’t know what’s in a good cause anymore, he said. We’ll never wake up to an ordinary morning.
You mustn’t think like that, said Elie.
But he was convinced he would never have her the way he wanted, and his sobs spilled into the hall and reached the Scribes and the kitchen and echoed with the pots and pans. It was a mournful cry that carried through the keys of the typewriters and the loose sheets of paper and the meters of dead dirt above them. It was the sound of a man breaking apart. It stunned the Compound into silence.
Adelajda,
Two people from our cellblock have disappeared without a roll call, a hanging, or a warning. No one has mentioned them. There have been no public hangings. We don’t know how they left without a trace.
